


i haven't met the new me yet (but i will)

by independentalto



Category: Star Trek: Discovery
Genre: Angst, Gen, Stream of Consciousness, half a character study?, past keyla detmer/joann owosekun, there's no jola happy ending but keyla gets a happy ending...ish
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-03-17
Updated: 2021-03-17
Packaged: 2021-03-25 18:34:47
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,013
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/30093360
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/independentalto/pseuds/independentalto
Summary: Joann is gone. Keyla tries to recover.
Relationships: Keyla Detmer & Sylvia Tilly, Michael Burnham & Keyla Detmer
Comments: 17
Kudos: 14





	i haven't met the new me yet (but i will)

**Author's Note:**

> Set somewhere in the aftermath of s3, when everything's calmed down and they've only been through _minor_ catastrophes. Minor is subjective, though. 
> 
> (I started writing this at 5:30 this morning, so if anything and everything about this screams ooc, I'm so sorry.)

Loss is funny, Keyla thinks.

She’s always thought grieving was straightforward: mope around for at least a week, something gets broken when the tears inevitably arrive, cry said tears either alone in quarters or over a hefty amount of alcohol with friends. (Sometimes it’s alone in quarters with alcohol.) 

That is loss as Keyla knows it – so when her mind first registers the idea that Joann is well and truly  _ gone _ , there’s small comfort she finds in knowing that at least loss is predictable. Her entire life upended? Unpredictable. The loss of Joann? Also unpredictable. How it feels to  _ lose  _ Joann? Variables known to every human since the beginning of time. She’s got this; she’s donned the cape of loss after the  _ Shenzhou  _ and she’ll do it again. This is nothing but familiar territory.

It turns out to be something entirely different. 

Loss, Keyla finds this time around, is the silence of her shared quarters threatening to overwhelm her with its oppression. Normally, said silence would be occupied with the heavy blanket of contentment and Joann’s light breathing against her skin, but left unchecked, it lets her thoughts run rampant, threads of shimmering gold tying her wrists together in the nostalgia of the past and never to move forward. 

(Some nights, she even catches herself thinking sometimes even Tilly’s snoring would be better than leaving her alone with just her thoughts. But Michael turns up at the mess hall with eye bags often enough for her to banish it from her mind.)

Loss is looking over on instinct across the helm, thinking she’ll see a set of playful dark eyes, rimmed delicately in a neutral eyeshadow. always looking at her. In pride, in worry, in set determination when they’re about to break through the frontiers of space, because  _ they  _ are Detmer and Owosekun, Owosekun and Detmer. They don’t just break the frontiers of space, they are the frontiers of space. Never one without the other.

It’s instead meeting the confused eyes of the new junior ops officer instead -- Johnson, Keyla thinks her name is -- and having to spit out her commands, words that were usually once smoother than replicated silk now clunky and foreign in her mouth from disuse. It’s staring at the ops chair in her off time and her heart constricting into something three times too small. It’s  _ sorry, Joann used to be able to... _ and quick nods to finish the sentence, unsure if she’ll be able to put out the words without her voice cleaving in two. 

Loss is combing through her memories with a fine-toothed comb, every memory undergoing an interrogation that would make even the most hardy of Starfleet captains proud. It’s spending night after night trying to figure out if there had just been another option, another way that she could’ve altered their ending, found some way to  _ change _ – 

If it’s not missing Joann that keeps her up at night, it’s wondering where it all went wrong.

_ “You can’t keep blaming yourself,” Culber tells her during one of their sessions. Keyla is slouched in his chair in her usual defeatist posture, wrecked bangs falling over her forehead and draping themselves over the cold metal of her augment. A posture, he doesn’t hesitate to remind her, that’s probably going to cause hell on her lumbar joints; she shrugs and sits into the position a little harder. “There’s nothing you could’ve done, Keyla. You have to start accepting that she’s gone.” _

_ “No.” Not for the first time, Keyla shakes her head. It certainly won’t be the last. “There’s always something.”  _

It’s automatically checking her communicator for messages like a lovestruck teenager; each time it turns up empty, reality splashes her across the face, cold and hard. It’s spending nights prone in her quarters scrolling through the remnants of what was, the memory of Joann’s hearty laughter ringing through the air whenever Keyla makes an awful joke.

_ “Why are you like this?” she asks Keyla one time, and the question only makes Keyla laugh harder. Truthfully, she can’t explain why – but what she  _ does _ know is that it makes Joann laugh, and if Joann’s laughter were sustainable, she’d live on it for the rest of her life.  _

_ Not that she’d tell anyone. _

_ “Well,” she answers, another smile growing at the corners of her lips, and Joann shakes her head fondly. “When two people love each other very much, they might decide that they want to get very close…”  _

_ It makes Joann let loose another peal of laughter, and Keyla swears her triumphant smile could power the whole of Discovery’s spore drive. “You are absolutely insufferable,” Joann tells her, and Keyla just shrugs, settling into Joann’s side with that same grin directed upwards to her girlfriend.  _

_ “Yeah, well,” she says, and it makes Joann wrap a sturdy arm around her shoulder, pulling her close into a secure warmth. Into  _ home _. “Deal with me, universe.” _

Loss, she finds, is being slashed open from head to toe and spilling blood for all to see while acting like the band-aid being offered to you would close the wound entirely. It’s fake laughter and stoic helm shifts and _ pretending _ – something she’s had plenty of experience in. 

_ Pretending _ , she snorts to herself in the dark of one night, tilting her head back blankly so the tears slide back into her eyes. There’s a light  _ thunk  _ as her head hits the wall, and all Keyla can do is inhale through her nose and wait until morning. Always until morning, always teetering on the edge of the abyss.  _ All pretending does is break you, anyways.  _

In the back of her mind, Keyla knows there should be tears. There are tears that  _ should _ be falling, either right there on the bridge or in the privacy of her bunk, but they never seem to fall at the right time. They don’t fall when the eddy of her thoughts stays her waking until the wee hours, eyes aching with exhaustion but every cell in her mind screaming Joann’s name. They don’t fall when she spends her nights staring listlessly into the space of their quarters (she really should stop referring to it as  _ theirs,  _ Culber says it’s part of the recovery process), wondering if she’s really experiencing her current reality or if this is all a cruel holodeck simulator. 

They fall during the most random of times – once, Keyla turns onto her side for the first time in three nights, blanket tucked around her in an attempt to turn in early, captain’s orders – and suddenly her shoulders are shaking like she’s flying through an ion storm, wetness racing to streak down her cheeks and chin. Something in her has simply just  _ broken  _ – hit its last limit and decided to take down the rest of Keyla’s crumbling walls with it. 

With every attempt to catch her breath, there is the faint sound of a piece of her splintering in two, and she is crying once more, desperate fingers clutching the edges of her blanket in a faint approximation of being held. (Of how she’d  _ used  _ to be held.) 

She knows why the tears are there, rationally: they’re a breaking point of having not been held for three months now, of weeks of sleep deprivation and loneliness consuming the last dregs of her livelihood. Of having to hold her head high in the wake of it all, of shrugging off helping hands and kind words and promising everyone that she’s  _ fine _ , thank you, and no, there wasn’t anything they could do. 

She’s Keyla Detmer. She shrugs off losses with the blink of an augmented eye and the other turned towards the horizon; while the loss of Joann Owosekun is a serrated knife to her heart, she has a job to do. There was always a job to do, and she’ll be damned if she can’t do it.

She  _ has  _ to do it. There’s no telling what’ll happen if she doesn’t.

* * *

An unexpected side effect of loss, she discovers, is the sympathetic words of those you love doing their best to be there for you in the aftermath. 

It isn’t that Keyla doesn’t appreciate them – she really does – it’s just that she knows that as much as their antics are helpful distractions, they’re temporary buoys, and she hates that the true things that keep her afloat in the sea of swirling emotions are memories of what were and fantasies of what could have been. 

It still doesn’t stop them from trying, though.

_ “I’m sorry,” Tilly tells her the first night after Joann is gone, when Keyla’s spent her entire day’s energy pretending she can confidently man the helm – hell, she’s spent her entire day’s energy pretending she can  _ operate –  _ without Joann by her side. It’s a Herculean effort: she knows it, the entire bridge knows it, Saru knows it.  _

_ It’s also probably why Tilly’d waited until she’d seen Keyla put the bare minimum into herself and dazedly walked back to her quarters before springing the visit onto her. And as much as Keyla would’ve preferred to practically rot away, she knew her friends meant well. “I know Joann was everything to you.”  _

_ Keyla was hardly ideal company these days anyways; grief, regret, and barely-tempered resentment were companions she kept wrapped around her shoulders. It tended not to make her fun at parties.  _

_ “She’s everywhere,” she admits to Tilly with a deep exhale that sends a strand of copper hair flying into the air. The confession is stilted, awkward, and in an a startlingly clarifying moment, Keyla realizes that she’s never been in this position before. None of them have ever seen her like this: even after her transfer from the Shenzhou, she’d been quiet. Stoic, even, an ear to everyone else’s problems instead of airing out her own, never weakened by the whimsies of emotions. What she did feel they all presumed only Joann saw in the comfort of their own quarters, and until now, such a system had worked just fine. _

_ Now that she was on the other side of the door, it was difficult to pull out the right words to say. How  _ could  _ she explain that all of her thoughts still inevitably ended up at Joann? How could she explain her sleepless nights, Joann’s memory taking up every single living moment of her day, her heart rattling in her chest and being exposed for everyone to see? How could she explain that that terrified her more than any wormhole navigation to the future, more than any Emerald Chain death mission, more than watching Joann swim in front of her eyes while oxygen deprivation closed its unforgiving hand around her throat?  _

_“She’s everywhere,” Keyla tries again, and Tilly just nods. She’s trying; Keyla knows, and for that, she couldn’t be more grateful. “God, I miss her so much,” she whispers, and she hopes Tilly can see the desperation brimming in her eyes, such is the frustration and pure, unadulterated grief violently fighting to release themselves from the confines of her chest. It’s a pressure bomb, she knows, and one day, it will blow when she least expects it. “I –“ There’s not much more she can say without faltering; the fail-safe of her own engineering has finally become her downfall._ _The number one rule of being Keyla Detmer: you didn’t talk about your emotions, sessions with Culber be damned. “I’m sorry, Syl, I –”_

_ Tilly, bless her soul, reads her in an instant. “We don’t have to talk about it,” she offers instead, and much to Keyla’s surprise, holds out a few bottles of Saurian brandy. “Bryce handed them to me when he heard I was coming over,” she admits, and Keyla has to stifle a laugh. It’s very Bryce, now that she thinks about it. “We can put on a bad 21 _ _ st _ _ century holofilm?”  _

_ “Tilly.” Tilly pauses halfway through opening the bottle to see Keyla’s hand over hers, the pilot giving her a brief nod and squeeze of the hand. “Thanks.” _

_ Tilly just gives her a grin in return. It’s kind, really, speaking of an understanding that temporarily soothes the storm raging in Keyla’s bloodstream. “Let’s see if you’re saying that when I’m drinking you under the table.” _

* * *

_ Michael’s approach is laughably different – in almost complete Vulcan fashion, her long-standing crewmate shows up unannounced at her quarters with an unfamiliar-looking box in her hand. “Old 21st-century board game,” she explains when Keyla numbly steps aside to let her in; she’d just come off of a thought tangent featuring shore leave, a cozy apartment and home cooked meals. (Frighteningly domestic, really – even more so when she thought about how easily the thoughts had come when it came to Joann. She hates her mind sometimes.) “Thought you might want to pass some time.”  _

_ The board game turns out to be a simple version of strategization, and Keyla has to laugh at the ease in which Michael lets her ships get picked off by Keyla’s shots. “G-6,” she calls, and Michael’s face flickers in mock offense before reaching for a red peg. “Did I sink your battleship?”  _

_ “You sank my last battleship,” Michael confirms, and Keyla does a brief fist pump before they’re setting up for another round. If only Joann could see her now, beating Michael Burnham at a tactical children’s game, she muses, and the thought is so natural, so anticipatory, that the thought of not telling Joann brings to a fiery crash the mild resistance Keyla’s managed to put up for the last half hour. Better yet, she muses (because her mind is already here, why not put it through some more torture?), if Joann were here, she’d be half curled into her, lilting voice melding with her next moves and making them the unstoppable force Starfleet knew them to be. And maybe after Michael left, they’d play the game themselves – she’d absolutely kick Joann’s ass, no question. But maybe she’d let her win once or twice, just to see her favorite smile light up their quarters. _

“Stop letting me win,” Joann would chastise, and Keyla would tilt her head in innocent confusion. “You know exactly what I’m talking about. Don’t even.”    
  
“I have no idea what you’re talking about,” Keyla would answer in her best demure voice, and hand Joann a battleship piece with a twinkle in her eye that indicated the exact opposite. “Best out of three?” 

And maybe Joann would shake her head, maybe she would fondly roll her eyes -- the scenario’s different every time Keyla constructs it. But the answer is always the same, amused and deep-rooted with a current of amusement: “Only if you actually try this time.” 

_ “You’re thinking about her again, aren’t you?” Michael’s voice wrenches her out of the reverie, and it’s with equal parts guilt and disappointment that Keyla gives the other woman an exhausted nod. “I thought about her, too, when she first left,” she says, and never has one of Keyla’s eyebrows hit the ceiling so quickly. “She was...she wasn’t everything, but I never dreamed…” For all of their differences and strifes, the two of them have a striking commonality: words are difficult little devils; actions speak much more loudly and with much less effort than spitting out syllables. “She was a lot.” Michael says finally, her normally blank expression settled into one of empathetic sympathy. _

_ Aside from Saru, Keyla is the only one on the Discovery with the knowledge of the intimacy Michael shared with Philippa Georgiou – prime Philippa, that is – and perhaps is the sole person that, in that thread, understands the gravity of Emperor Georgiou’s presence on the Discovery. Understands what it must’ve taken to not seize on every inch of selfishness Michael possessed (and Keyla suspects there’s actually very little, the way Michael operates) to keep Terran Philippa here – here with  _ her  _ – consequences be damned. _

_ What it must’ve taken to watch her leave. _

_ “Yeah,” Keyla answers instead, because it’s easier than Michael having to admit her feelings for Georgiou, and it’s a hell of a lot easier than admitting that all of her free moments are spent dreaming about a life that would never happen. “She was.”  _

_ “She’s still allowed to mean a lot to you,” Michael sets up her battleships with deft dexterity, and when she looks up, her normally commandeering brown eyes are soft. “She was a big part of your life, Keyla, and you’re allowed to mourn.”  _

_ Keyla swallows. Emotion clogs the back of her throat once more, and she’s really hoping to save it until she can fall apart in the privacy of darkness and her blankets. Of  _ course  _ she knows she’s allowed to mourn Joann. Grieving is a part of accepting what’s been lost; she just wishes her mind hadn’t decided to mount itself in grief mode every moment of the day. It’s depressing, it’s detracting from her duties to Starfleet, and most of all, it’s debilitating with the ability to break her entirely. To be continuously broken was not an option. “B-9,” she calls out, voice stodgy, and Michael takes that as the answer it’s supposed to be.  _

_ “Hit.” Comforting as she’s trying to be, there’s no mistaking the displeasure that wrinkles Michael’s nose. Small victories, Keyla muses. Small victories. “C-4.”  _

_ “Miss.” They call coordinates back and forth for a while, Keyla plundering Michael’s battleships with practiced ease until finally, at least three games later, Michael sets aside her final battleship with a defeated smile. _

_ “I know when I’m outranked,” she acquiesces, and Keyla’s laugh is nothing short of defeatist. For a moment, she considers asking Michael to stay – chase away the memories and fantasies that are sure to haunt her as soon as she steps out the door, keep her fragilely rebuilt exterior from cracking apart once more – but the moment passes, the lid on the box slid on, Michael’s expression still shining with a rare offer of outward emotional support. “Things get better with time,” are her solemn parting words, and Keyla can only stare up at her with apathetic blue eyes and a deadened, exhausted expression. That things will get better is an unheard-of concept for her at the moment, sue her. “It’s a long ion storm, Keyla. But one day, the storm will ease, and you’ll get through it.” _

_ “And if it doesn’t?” The words are out before Keyla can stop them, and even Michael looks surprised at their slip past Keyla’s lips.  _

_ “It will.” The door to her quarters slides open and shut once more, but for once, the silence Keyla’s left in doesn’t scream of markers leading her to Joann. It’s settled, this time, seeded with the possibility of recovery and a light at the end of the crushing tunnel of grief.  _

_ Joann is gone – and Keyla will _ always _ be entitled to mourn her – but Michael’s words bring forth the hope that perhaps said mourning will no longer possess every fiber of her being, if the universe has any forgiveness in it left for her. _

Loss is funny, Keyla thinks. It’s the unwanted thrill ride of denial, depression, road blocks to acceptance; it’s screaming until your throat scrapes itself raw and you wish you could shed at least a single tear so that you could say you did. It’s wondering if anything will ever  _ stop _ , and whether you’ll notice if it does, or if you’ll just continue into the void, blinded by the grief of what as and what could have been. It is, for all intents and purposes, the lowest of the low, a rock bottom she’s found herself at the bottom of with only a bottle of Saurian brandy and words she doesn’t know how to say aloud. 

It’s also acceptance, she knows, an acceptance that people enter and leave their lives for a reason, the deep, calming breaths that follow when her tears break free from their confines. The courage, really, to say said words out loud even if they’re to an empty room. (She might need another bottle of brandy to get them past her lips, but it’s the action that counts, no?) It’s knowing that she doesn’t have the privilege to make it all stop, but she  _ does  _ have the fortitude to go on, the promise of peace just beyond her grasp. 

It’s with that promise of peace, only a short hour after Michael departs her room, that Keyla is able to hold herself close and slumber peacefully for the first time in what feels like centuries.

* * *

But this is space – cold, deep, unforgiving space with twists and turns to drive even the sanest man mad – and even the combined fail-safes of Michael and Saru’s impeccable schedule planning don’t account for occasional sick days. 

Somehow, beta shift becomes the gamma shift becomes the alpha shift, and suddenly, Keyla is at an empty helm, head swiveling for the eager features of Jr. Lt. Johnson. She’d just gotten used to having the girl in the seat next to her, and it usually wasn’t like her to be late – if anything,  _ Keyla  _ had been the late one, much to the bridge’s chagrin. 

“Where’s Johnson?” she asks, and perhaps all of her sleep’s gone to REM recovery, or her coffee hasn’t kicked in yet that morning, but Keyla doesn’t register the painful sympathy on the bridge crew’s faces until the helm rings with an all-too-familiar voice. 

“Keyla.”

“Joann.” Even the way Joann’s tongue curls around the _ l  _ of her name makes Keyla want to scream. It undoes all of her emotional progress in two syllables, makes her want to lay out every single, painstaking piece of her shattered self and beg Joann to put her back together the way she used to of nights long ago.  _ There’s no one else that does it as well,  _ she wants to beg.  _ There’s no one else that’ll do it.  _

See, Joann  _ is  _ gone – gone from Keyla’s bed, from her arms, from her life and into that of the fiery-spirited ensign from Engineering after one too many of her near-death experiences ( _ “I can’t pick up someone that’ll just throw themselves off of the cliff again, Keyla” _ ) – and Keyla will continue to defend that such an absence is mournable just as an actual death would be. 

Because it  _ is  _ a death, albeit an unusual one -- the Joann Owosekun as Keyla knew her is gone, and there is nothing she can do to change that. 

Even if every fiber of her being is screaming out to her to try one more time, that this time she knows the right words to say, the apologies that should roll off the tip of her tongue, the pieces of herself she needs to expose and give away simply for a  _ glance  _ in her direction --

_ “There’s nothing you could’ve done, Keyla. There’s nothing you could’ve done.” _

_ “It’s a long ion storm, Keyla. But one day, the storm will ease, and you’ll get through it.” _

_ And what if it doesn’t?  _ Keyla asks herself, even as she and Joann move as one, the effortless product of a love long lost. Each synchronized movement is a battering ram against the glass walls of her heart, and it’s easy -- oh so easy -- to let those walls shatter, to break herself once more for  _ hope _ \-- 

_ It will.  _

She can’t give Joann Owosekun the satisfaction of seeing her cry ever again – not today, not tomorrow, not ever. Not if she stands a chance of making it through her own ion storm. Despite the broken pieces and the healthy serving of humble pie, Keyla is still a pilot -- and whether it’s her mental helm or that of the  _ Discovery’s,  _ this shift is about to see the best damn flying this side of the universe. Even if she has to fake it for the entirety of it and put herself back together at the end of it all.

Pilots, after all, stare death and loss in the face every day and pull themselves out by the skin of their teeth each time. The loss she’s facing may threaten to grind Keyla to dust, but hell if she’s still not a pilot. 

And hell if she won’t pull herself out of this. 

**Author's Note:**

> Any and all feedback appreciated 💜


End file.
